“Yeah, it’s just—sometimes my adopted sister is out of control and she needs to calm down and be in a safe place.” She tried to talk in a higher voice, like she could put her voice out of reach of the creak, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t stop faking.
“That sounds hard,” he said, his hand low on her back.
“It’s okay.”
“Okay. So you can’t try out for the spring musical because your mother is taking care of your sister? And you can help her, somehow? Is that right?”
His rubbing hand traced an oval near the base of her spine, just under the waist of her jeans.
“Well, there’s also . . . to be honest, I can’t sing,” Lauren said, shrugging again.
“That’s just another put-on,” he said, squeezing her hand.
“No, I can’t.”
“Ah, come on,” he said, leaning in so their heads were pressed together, “try me.” He had coffee breath.
“No, it’s true,” she said. “That’s why I used to play the flute, to get out of singing.”
“And how was your embouchure?”
Lauren blushed. The bouch puffed against her ear. A cloud of coffee grains in her eyes, in her nose. She was dizzy. She squeezed his hand back and pulled away.
“Maybe I can help Paula out with the props, if she does that again,” she said, standing up.
“Mm-hm. Just be aware,” Mr. Smith said, taking his pen and looking down at his papers again, “that I’m onto you.”
Her stomach flipped. “What do you mean?”
“That business from before about the birth control,” he said, licking a finger and turning another page. “You and I and Paula all know very well that’s yet another put-on. You’re just full of put-ons today.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Lauren said.
“Lauren, give me a break.”
“I wasn’t putting anybody on.”
“There is no way,” Mr. Smith said, head down, voice dropping although they were alone in the room, tapping his pen on the desk, “that your very proper, very Catholic mother would do that.”
“She’s only Catholic for herself,” Lauren said. “She doesn’t force anything on me. I’m not even getting confirmed.”
It was odd to be standing over him like this, talking down at him. He was the one who’d started it.
“These are my people you’re talking about, too, you know,” he said.
“It’s none of your business,” Lauren said.
“You made it my business by bringing it up,” Mr. Smith said, looking up but not in her eyes, “and as your teacher, it is certainly my business if a student is lying to me.”
Her body buzzed with the old thrill, a tingle that traveled up her neck and spidered across the top of her scalp. She stood at the gate between telling a lie and making it true.
“I’m not lying,” Lauren said. “How much do you want to bet?”
“Wagers of any kind are prohibited on school property,” Mr. Smith said. “Did we learn nothing from the strip poker controversy of last fall?”
“I can prove to you that I’m not lying.”
Mr. Smith put his hands up. “This conversation needs to end here.”
“Why?” Lauren asked.
“Because it’s not appropriate,” he said with an air of finality, twirling his pen. “You are being inappropriate.”
“You mean it’s inappropriate for me to lie to you, which I am not doing? Or it’s inappropriate for us to be talking about birth control pills?”
“Stitch, Rajiv, how nice to see you both,” Mr. Smith said as the boys cartwheeled into the room.
These days Stitch and Rajiv moved around Bethune by means of cartwheels and pogo jumps and froggy hops and single axels, thanks to their shared interest in the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the women’s figure skating program in the Albertville Winter Olympics. Sometimes, in mid-conversation, Stitch set his mouth in a perfect line and began whipping his head around in the manner of the band’s jumping-bean bass player, then he would pick up the thread of the conversation he was in as if nothing had happened, and no one commented or criticized him, just as no teachers told him off for boing-boinging in a zigzag down the passageway between the yearbook office and the math department, slashing at his air guitar, screwing up his eyes and working his lips in a rubbery ecstasy.
“What a little punk-ass bitch,” Rajiv was saying.
“Rajiv has a case of the Mondays,” Mr. Smith said in an exaggerated pouting voice, and everyone cringed.
Rajiv was upset about the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ appearance on Saturday Night Live that weekend. Lauren had watched it at Paula’s, flopped next to Paula on her bed. Lauren hated that band but didn’t say so, because Stitch and Rajiv loved them. Stitch and Rajiv talked a lot about the band’s “musicianship” and their “influences,” which Lauren knew nothing about. She did know that all their songs were about fucking—they wore barely any clothes onstage or in their videos, probably because they wanted to be ready at any time to do all the fucking they sang about—and even the songs that weren’t about fucking seemed to be them trying to prove they could write a song that wasn’t about fucking, like the cheesy ballad that Stitch and Rajiv would yell-sing down the hallways. They were big dumb naked red-faced fuck machines, except for the guitar player. John. John was the one. Sad brown eyes, ridiculous cheekbones. Paula had a picture of John smoking an emotional cigarette taped to the headboard of her bed. In the video for the cheesy ballad, John wore a Kurt Cobain outfit, cardigan and baggy grandpa trousers and a knit hat with a pom-pom on top, and maybe the outfit was like an upside-down distress flag to show everyone that John was in the wrong band and he needed out, and the outfit would look stupid on anyone else, but on John it looked cool, the same way whatever Stitch did was cool because it was Stitch who was doing it. On Saturday Night Live, John didn’t wear a shirt on the first song, but it was more like he had forgotten to wear a shirt, or he was too sad to put on a shirt, or like the lead singer had ripped off John’s shirt to force him to fake being the rebel fuck machine he so clearly was not. John hunched over his guitar on the far side of the stage, looking cold and hungry, doing the bare minimum. Falling asleep on his feet like a horse.
“John is so depressed,” Paula said. “He can’t handle the fame.” Paula talked about all her rock stars like this, like they were her friends who confided in her, but in cryptographs through the pages of Kerrang! and Spin, and now she was gossiping about her famous pals behind their backs. She talked about Kurt Cobain’s mysterious stomach condition like she was his personal physician.
John did look depressed up there on the Saturday Night Live stage, but pointedly so, focused and industrious in his depression, like he was studying for the depression SATs, and the lead singer was so infuriated with him by the end of the first song that he kicked John right in the ass—flung himself to the ground and spun around on his back and brought his knee to his chest and punched his foot forward and awp! It was like something PJ would do to Sean, except then Sean would have sat on PJ’s face and farted in vengeance. John just took it. Lauren and Paula looked at each other to confirm that the kick had really happened. Paula was taping the show, and when it went to commercial she stopped and rewound the tape so they could examine the kick, frame by wobbly frame. When the band came out for their second song, the cheesy ballad, John had put on his Kurt Cobain outfit and he was playing the familiar notes of the song’s introduction but in the wrong order, backward, slowed down, bent, in a different scale, or de-tuned, his arpeggios a vortex, a drain that his bandmates were circling, and as the song reached what should have been its apex and John, poor dear scrawny gorgeous kicked-in-the-ass John, stepped up to the mic to sing the climactic chorus that was also the title of the big hit cheesy ballad, he screwed up his face and instead of singing the words, he went, “WOOOOOOO!”
Paula burst out laughing.
Again, higher-pitched this time. “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
John sounded l
ike a girl, like a fan. Paula flung herself back on her bed and bicycled her legs in the air for joy and laughed some more.
“Why did he do that?” Lauren asked Paula, but she knew why. No one knew how much power John had until he decided to use it to say no, to reject what was happening and create something anarchic and better. He said no without saying it. It was startling and childish, and that’s why it was beautiful. At the end of the song, the lead singer glared at John like he was a swiveling head in middle school, but it didn’t matter. It was done. They’d been in a war and the war was over and the big dumb fuck machine had lost and John had won.
“John is so lovely,” Lauren said, and Paula WOOOOOed in agreement.
“It’s so unfair to the rest of the band,” Rajiv was saying in Tedquarters now. “What an asshole.”
“And what a choice of insult, Rajiv!” Mr. Smith said.
“But we’ll always remember that he did that,” Lauren said. “Would we be talking about them right now if John had just shown up and played like normal?”
“Like you know anything about music,” Rajiv said. “Name one song of theirs that isn’t on the new record.” Stitch stopped-dropped-and-rolled to a spot just behind Rajiv, drew his knee to his chest, and extended his leg until his foot pressed on Rajiv’s backside.
“I just think it’s cool that he took a risk and did something crazy that we would all remember,” Lauren said. “I bet he was scared.”
“Answer me—name one song,” Rajiv said, shimmying his ass against Stitch’s heel. Lauren was always in the witness box when Rajiv got started on music.
She looked at Stitch on the carpet, his foot grinding into Rajiv’s backside. Stitch screwed up his face and hit the note exactly as Lauren could hear it in her head: “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
The tape that Stitch had given her the night of The Man in the Moon was a copy of Gish, by the Smashing Pumpkins. She liked how the music on Gish sounded literally like metal, as if someone had translated into music the sound of metallurgic processes that she was vaguely aware of through factory field trips and reading Johnny Tremaine in eighth grade. Casting, forging, extrusions. A gleaming sound that hinted at a gruesome suffering beneath it, like Johnny Tremaine’s mangled hand were at the mixing board. But the singer was trying too hard to be hard, nasal and sneering, like he was mocking the listener for her poor judgment in listening to him, or for thinking she was good enough to listen to him. She could imagine Stitch singing the songs instead.
After Gish, Stitch gave her a cassette with Nevermind by Nirvana on one side and their other record, Bleach, on the other. All the songs written in pencil, each word individually underlined. Lauren had listened to Gish and Bleach enough to be able to speak with Stitch about them in a knowledgeable way, but Nevermind was the one she listened to over and over. Everyone was listening to Nevermind. Danielle Sheridan had a Nirvana T-shirt, and Rajiv gave her endless shit about it. For Lauren, Nevermind offered freedom in an enclosed space. The space could be Abby’s car on the way to Delaware Park or to the record stores and cafés on Elmwood Avenue, or the space could be the width of two headphones on the days when Lauren took the bus to school. Or at night, to drown out Mirela screaming.
“I don’t really pay attention to lyrics,” Stitch said, which struck Lauren as a radical idea. “I pay attention to production.” Stitch was interested in how a sound was constructed, compressed, how it scrambled the air around it. He wasn’t interested in words because they didn’t mean anything without the sound—an isolated lyric couldn’t bear to stand all on its own. There was a song on Nevermind, “On a Plain,” about not having words and not making sense. It made fun of itself for trying to have a message. Stitch had read that Kurt Cobain just dashed off the lyrics right before he recorded himself singing them. It was strange to be so careless about words that millions of people would hear and think about. But the emotions in the song were clear: restlessness, irritation, but also humor and not taking yourself seriously. The song was about caring about not caring. It had the feeling of marking time just before something big was going to happen. In class, Mr. Smith called this “liminal space,” and told the students to watch out in their reading for characters having important conversations on thresholds or staircases or through the windows of trains departing the station, one person on the train and the other left behind on the platform.
Kurt Cobain liked R.E.M., who had a big embarrassing hit record out when Lauren was in eighth grade, but Stitch said they had a lot of older records that were okay to listen to. He said Reckoning was the best R.E.M. record because the band wrote it very fast and didn’t have much time to think about it. A lot of second records were like that, he said—Nevermind was a second record.
That night, Lauren lay in bed listening to the tape of Reckoning that Stitch had made for her. Mirela was asleep, so Lauren could listen to the music chiming out of the small speakers on the tape deck, nothing to drown out. The most unfinished song on Reckoning was “Second Guessing,” because the entire chorus was “Uh-oh-oh, here we are,” over and over again. The song was stupid in a Smashing Pumpkins way, like it was daring you to become bored and frustrated with it, but it also made Lauren think of Kurt Cobain saying “Here we are now,” like he was in liminal space, like party guests standing in the doorway announcing themselves, bringing big expectations that they were expecting to be disappointed. Lauren imagined everyone she liked standing in this doorway, singing along with Nirvana or R.E.M. or the Pixies: Abby, Deepa, Stitch, even Claire. The only friend she couldn’t see there was Paula.
The phone rang, and Lauren knew it was Paula, like she was calling to ask why she wasn’t included in the doorway, and Lauren yelled, “I got it!”—remembering Mirela too late, hoping she wouldn’t wake up—and grabbed the receiver. “Hello?”
A click, and someone lightly breathing. “Hello?” a voice asked, and it took Lauren a moment to place it.
“Hello? Who is this?” Lauren asked.
“This is—wait, you called me,” the voice said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’m confused. Hello.”
“Stitch? Is that you?” Lauren asked.
“Yeah. This is weird. Uh, who is this?”
“This is Lauren.”
A crush call. They were back in middle school.
“I don’t get it—what happened?” Stitch asked. He sounded lost but so close, inside her head. Like there were doors opening inside her and he was walking through them, not knowing where he was. For the second time that day, Lauren felt the old thrill. She wanted to play—she hadn’t realized how much she missed this.
“What happened is that you called me,” she said lightly, like she was the one in charge of the joke.
“I didn’t—this is crazy,” Stitch said.
“It’s okay,” Lauren said. “If you’ve changed your mind about talking, that’s fine.”
“What?”
“Thanks for calling, Stitch,” she said.
“Wait—”
Lauren hung up the phone and sputtered a laugh like someone was watching her. She started to pick up the phone again to call around, try to figure out who had done it—but no, on second thought, better not to seem interested in a kiddie prank.
She switched off the lamp on her bedside table, and then she was alone in the dark with Reckoning. There were songs on Reckoning that felt ancient and bottomlessly sad, a sadness as old as a riverbed. Listening to some of the songs made her imagine sitting on the banks of a creek where a classmate had drowned—not a best friend, maybe someone you knew was nice and said “Hi” to and had always meant to get to know better, and now you never could.
She wouldn’t tell Stitch that sometimes she put on Crowded House at night as she fell asleep, because Crowded House wasn’t the type of band he would think was okay to listen to. They were too old and sweet, too nerdy. But the harmonies and the organ, the chimes of the guitars, created the same warm pooling feeling in her chest that she felt listening to Reckoni
ng or in Tedquarters or at the sleepover at Abby’s: the pleasurable sadness, like the lush sadness of autumn leaves, the sense in autumn that everything was full with loss and longing, with memories so beautiful that they couldn’t be spoken before they were washed away with winter’s thaw, and the spring would begin unaware of all that had been lost. These sentiments were too embarrassing to be put into words, too melty and mushy to be pounded into shape. She probably couldn’t tell anyone about them. They could only travel through chord progressions, vibrations through hollow chambers, compressed air through pipes. They were secrets and needed to be enjoyed in secret, like the nighttime car trips she used to take with Mom. The best and realest parts of life were unspoken, or unable to be spoken, the things that no one would tell you about—you had to teach yourself the language alone, and it had no words. You had to be in the right place at the right time, and paying attention. You had to be with the right people in the right doorway.
Crowded House had a new song called “Fall at Your Feet,” and to Lauren it naturally paired with Billy Bragg’s song “Trust,” because both songs had lines about a man being inside a woman. Weirdly, in the Billy Bragg song, the singer—a man—was singing from the perspective of the woman, and on top of that, she was pregnant. “He’s already been inside me,” Billy Bragg sang. So much of the character of his voice was located in the damp thrusting of his lips. The voice, the words, and Billy Bragg’s adenoids pressed against her wet and close, a squeaking-squishing that Lauren found almost unbearable and that she kept rewinding and listening to, squirming, because it was so strange and obscene and she wanted to understand it.
“I feel like I’m moving inside her,” the wimpy nice guy from Crowded House sang in “Fall at Your Feet.” She squirmed at this, too. He feels like it? Or was he doing it? That nerdy little noodle of a guy? What would it feel like? How would he know?
She thought about Mr. Smith. She felt his hand on her back from the afternoon. She’d been trying not to think about it. She put her hand between her legs so it could all overcome her and she could go to sleep. She thought about what he was like when he was alone, or alone with his girlfriend, if he had one—Paula had asked him if he did, and he’d shaken his head vehemently and said “No, no,” in a manner that left ambiguous whether he was denying having a girlfriend or denying Paula’s right to ask the question, and certainly left no space for clarification. During the school day, he could use up all his jokes and puns and sarcasm, alternate them as offense and defense as he dealt with all those dumb kids like Rajiv and Andy Figueroa, and by the time he came home he would be drained of anything that wasn’t serious and compassionate and ardent. That was a word Lauren had learned from him, ardent: overcome with admiration, loyalty, and passion for the one you love. Stunned by her. When he was alone and only one other person in the world was looking—a person that hadn’t been foisted on him but the one he wanted—that’s when you could see who he really was.
The Fourth Child Page 19
